5 Ways To Know You Are In The Rut.

As I said in the previous post of this series, falling into a Rut is extremely easy, but one is often well into the rut once they realize some form of change needs to occur. This list assumes that you have goals, not dreams, but goals. If you don’t have any goals then there really is no way you can be in a Rut. However, sometimes the goal is something as simple as coming up with goals or figuring out what you want to do. Everyone should have goals, be they health, spiritual, family, educational, financial, etc, everyone should have something they are working towards. No one is perfect, everyone has something they could work on, and thus everyone is susceptible to falling into the Rut. This list is definitely geared more towards people in my generation, thus I am mainly talking to 20 something professionals, however I welcome any other additions to this list to be added in the comments section, any additions, that don’t overlap will be appended to the list. Also, if you don’t want to leave a comment, additions can be emailed to M.Wanzer@IsIt5Oclock.com.

1. You can talk more about the new season of Entourage, True Blood, ANTM, or any other great TV show of our generation, more than you can talk about progress on one of your goals. I have begun to realize more and more that television is one of the major inhibitors to success and building wealth and independence. Americans spend an average of 151 hours a month watching television, which equates to about 5 hours a day. When you consider that we spend 8 hours a day at work, maybe 2 hours commuting and at least 6 hours sleeping, that average of 5 hours that Americans spend on TV can be greatly used to achieve goals.

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Coming out of The Rut.

Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing – too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart remains unfulfilled.
-Stephen Covey, Author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Once you leave college a lot of the spontaneity that your daily routine used to have is gone. If you try you can keep the spontaneity in your life but it is hard. I have said this in previous a previous post, but once you start working a 9 to 5 the days get very monotonous and the time just passes quicker then you would like. A lot of times your day may go something like this: Wake up, get dressed, eat something on the go for breakfast, get on the same road that you commute on every day for your morning drive to work, arrive at work, settle in, spend your next 8 hours working on a project, assignment, or task that you have been working on for the last six months. If you are lucky your projects change frequently, if you are unlucky you have been doing the same repetitive task for the last 5 years. When you finally to get home from your commute from work to home you rarely feel like working on a side business, going to the gym or taking part in some other productive activity, so what do you do? Most likely you will take part in a few of the activities that Mr. Covey mentions in the quote that I began this post with, thus falling into what I like to call The Rut. To digress for a quick second, if you are working the good ol 9 to 5 and you are not that far removed from college, the problem of taking too many vacations that last too long, as described by Mr. Covey, is not a problem you have to worry about, companies make sure you can’t do that by instituting the crazy leave policies, I wish I had the problem of being able to take to many vacations, okay now back to the topic of this post.

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